By Fenter Northern
CHRISTIANS LOVE walking with God in the sunshine so much Henry J. Zelley wrote the popular hymn, Walking in Sunlight, in 1899. It’s easy to be a Christian when all things go well.
Then suddenly the ceiling falls through in one’s world and down crashes the curtain on our happy sunlight Christianity. We should be aware that Paul’s encouragement to “walk in the light as He [Jesus] is in the light,” is talking about the light of truth. Truth is still truth whenever darkness falls around us. John wrote God is light, 1 Jn. 1:5., but that does not mean He cannot be found in the dark moment of your life. Moses said he drew near to God on a very dark day: Exo 20:21 “And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.”
So God can be very near in the thick darkness of your life and can be found with a message of light for you when all seems desperate.
This was not only true of Moses, but the experience of thousands of Christians who found Him very near in the darkness of their life.
I have this little anonymous poem somewhere in my files:
I walked a mile with Pleasure,
She chatted all the way,
But left me none the wiser,
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she,
But, oh, the things I learned from her,
When sorrow walked with me.”
Even after 70+ years of ministry I am still greatly lacking in what God would want me to be. However, what and where ever I am, I owe it to the greatest lessons I have learned during dark days, either in my own life or standing by others in their dark days trying in whatever way I could to help bear their burden.
For a moment, let’s fancy we were granted the power to trip back through our life to eliminate this or that, and start over again. What would you do? What would I do? I think the first thing would be to say, “Oh yes, erase that dark day in my life or that dark period,” But when the granter would say, “Are you sure you want the great spiritual lessons you learned to be erased also, for they too will go when your tough times are removed?” I think I would think again because I believe I am closer to God now having had those tough experiences with their cutting lessons.
God knows what is best for us. It is written that He learned this by humbling Himself within a human body to experience the dark days of human suffering. “Heb 5:8,9 “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.” If we are perplexed when there seems no explanation for the dark days of suffering, especially to innocent people, we are, if fair, immediately confronted with explaining why good things happened to bad people.
Perhaps we have matured a bit when we come to realize some things in life are not problems to be explained but challenges to make us better people. It is the noble souls who can meet life’s difficulties as a character ladder to be climbed to reach what God intends for us to be. Jesus said, “follow me,” and when we do, we too must remember his crown on earth was one of thorns.
I would close by saying that we can wear a crown of thorns with joy only when we realize it is the tough times that can develop the tough faith needed to endure to the end. However, as all Christians know, it can be tremendously tough at times. God refused to grant an affirmative answer to Paul’s plea to remove the thorn in his flesh, whatever that was. “My grace is sufficient for you,” was the answer. Grace is bestowed upon and through us when a thorn in the flesh better equips us to understand, feel, and comfort those around us in pain, I have seen it. There is nothing more admirable, more clothed in beauty than for one to find that God is in the dark too, teaching us that the thorn in our flesh cannot be removed because it perfects us with His grace making us what He calls us to be as we travel through this alien land. Amen!